Texas says no evidence of election systems being compromised

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos was the keynote speaker at the Texas Border Coalition Annual Meeting in Laredo, at La Posada Hotel, Thursday, November 2, 2017.

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos was the keynote speaker at the Texas Border Coalition Annual Meeting in Laredo, at La Posada Hotel, Thursday, November 2, 2017.

Photo: Cuate Santos / Laredo Morning Times

Photo: Cuate Santos / Laredo Morning Times

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Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos was the keynote speaker at the Texas Border Coalition Annual Meeting in Laredo, at La Posada Hotel, Thursday, November 2, 2017.

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos was the keynote speaker at the Texas Border Coalition Annual Meeting in Laredo, at La Posada Hotel, Thursday, November 2, 2017.

Photo: Cuate Santos / Laredo Morning Times

Texas says no evidence of election systems being compromised

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AUSTIN — The Texas secretary of state insisted Tuesday that there is no evidence that voting or voter registration systems were compromised prior to the 2016 election.

Those assurances came after NBC News reported that the U.S. intelligence community had developed substantial evidence that state websites or voter registration systems in seven states — including Texas — were compromised by Russian-backed covert operatives prior to the 2016 election — but never told the states involved.

Top-secret intelligence requested by President Barack Obama in his last weeks in office identified seven states where analysts had reason to believe Russian operatives had compromised state websites or databases, NBC News reported.

Three senior intelligence officials told the network that the intelligence community believed the states as of January 2017 were Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and Wisconsin.

While officials in Washington informed several of those states in the run-up to the 2016 election that foreign entities were probing their systems, none were told the Russian government was behind it, state officials told NBC News.

But Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos pushed back on that report on Tuesday.

“Our agency has seen no evidence that any voting or voter registration systems in Texas were compromised before the 2016 elections, contrary to the suggestions contained in the alleged classified intelligence assessment described, but not shown, to us by NBC News,” Pablos said.

“Election security is a top priority for our agency as we continue to employ effective and forward-thinking cybersecurity measures to further strengthen our state’s elections systems and safeguard against any malicious cyber activity. As always, our elections and information technology officials are working tirelessly to ensure that every eligible Texas voter can cast a ballot with confidence,” he added.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, which had earlier ordered a review of state processes to determine if elections information had been compromised after reports of Russian interference first surfaced, referred questions to Pablos, who oversees the state’s elections.

Sam Taylor, Pablos’ communications director, said Texas does not believe its elections were hacked or compromised in any way, despite the NBC report, and has never been alerted by federal officials of any successful hack by the Russians or anyone else.

The reason, he said, is that after earlier reports that Russian-linked entities had tried to access Texas’ elections system, the state Department of Information Resources conducted a detailed review of whether any state sites had been hit. While two websites — the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission — were found to have been “scanned” for possible weak links by a “bad actor IP address” that could have allowed for a successful penetration inside the security firewall, neither were penetrated and no date was compromised.

Taylor said the federal Department of Homeland Security informed state officials that the “bad actor IP address” involved in the scanning had Russian ties of some sort.

Previously the U.S. Department of Homeland Security formally notified Texas and 20 other states that hackers targeted them prior to the 2016 presidential election. But the ones who tried to mess with Texas didn't get very far, officials with the Texas secretary of state's office have said.

Instead of targeting the state's voter registration database, hackers in 2016 searched for a vulnerability on the secretary of state's public-facing website, federal agents said, according to Sam Taylor, an agency spokesman.

"If anyone was trying to get into the elections system, they were apparently targeting the wrong website," Taylor said